“Salute #{@Ruby}!”

Some times ago I had to parse a XML messages’ file to produce some i18n properties files.

I decided to try it with Ruby, mainly because of two reasons:

1. I’m continuosly exploring some dynamically-typed languages, like Python and Ruby
2. I wanted to try the conciseness of programming with closures

So, I used the REXML API to process the XML file. The result code looks like the one below:

require 'rexml/document'
include REXML
englishFile = File.new('englishFileName', 'w+')
spanishFile = File.new('spanishFileName', 'w+')
portugueseFile = File.new('portugueseFileName', 'w+')
errorMessagesFile = File.new("errorMessages.xml")
document = Document.new(file)
root = document.root
root.each_element("Property") do |propertyTag|
  id = propertyTag.attributes['id']   
  propertyTag.each_element("element") do |elementTag|
      elementAttr = elementTag.attributes['otherTag']
      error = elementTag.text == nil ? "" : "#{id} = #{elementTag.text}\n"
      if elementAttr = "pt"
          portugueseFile << error
      elsif elementAttr == "es"
          spanishFile << error
      else 
          portugueseFile << error
      end
  end
end
errorMessagesFile.close()
englishFile.close()
spanishFile.close()
portugueseFile.close()

I like to solve this kind of tasks with programming languages (mainly the dynamically-typed ones..) I don’t know very much because it’s an opportunity to put my hands on them! This way I could experience Ruby’s closures syntax, it was really nice and I’m gonna try something new with it often!

*Updated: line 13